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New Real-Time Analysis Helps Sport Businesses Better Understand Fans’ Feelings
Today, Brandtix, the real-time athlete brand value index platform, officially announced its partnership with Lexalytics, the leader in cloud and on-prem text analytics solutions.
The Brandtix Sports Index, which leads the market in Live Athlete Brand Statistics (L.A.B.S) indexing for European football clubs and players, chose Lexalytics text analytics because of its unique combination of advanced machine learning techniques and natural language processing, allowing for contextual processing to accurately determine sports-specific sentiment analysis, including named entity recognition.
Social media in football gains more and more traction with every season, championship and tournament. The player who sits at the summit of football social media popularity is Cristiano Ronaldo with a staggering 215m followers across all major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). Ronaldo is mentioned on average 19,000 times per day and when performing on the biggest stage, that number can reach as high as 98,000 (Figure recorded following the winning penalty in Champions League Final). Ronaldo’s current index score is 849 (which incorporates sentiment). He is 99 points ahead of his closest rival, Neymar, and 227 points clear of any other European player. With the European Championship just days away, the brands associated to Ronaldo will be the beneficiaries of the positive sentiment around the most marketable player on the planet.
CEO of Brandtix, Jon Rosenblatt, explained, “The purpose of Brandtix is to give football clubs and players a specific and realtime value based on playing performance and off-field digital activity; namely social media and digital reach, alongside fan sentiment. Our platform provides a completely new ‘one stop shop’ for holistic insights into player and team values, doing so in real time. The partnership with Lexalytics is a significant one, as fan sentiment analysis forms part of our data to give our platform a key differential.”
Brandtix has taken Lexalytics insights and combined it with its own data science, proprietary algorithms, natural language processing and domain knowledge, extracted from hundreds of diverse data points across 19 languages; thereby creating the Index Social Sentiment Intelligence Engine.
CEO of Lexalytics, Jeff Catlin said: “What’s exciting and unique about this partnership is that the feelings of sports fans – especially football ones – are rife with colloquialisms and therefore a challenge for most text analytics platforms. Our algorithms detect fan vernacular and accurately translate it as positive or negative. Jesse Lingard’s winning strike in the FA Cup final generated a groundswell of social posts describing it by the slang term ‘sick’. We immediately decoded this as a positive connotation of the word. With a highly engaged social fan base of 87.6M, the sentiment intelligence engine was put to the test!”
With Euro 2016 set to eclipse the digital traction of the World Cup 2014, the need has arisen to better understand the data generated. Marketers looking to gain insights around players, teams, products and brands may have a wealth of information but real time value and sentiment is something that has, until now, been missing. Brandtix, with Lexalytics’ help, has changed that.
Editors Notes: Brandtix is a London-based sports technology organization, leading the market in real time player indexing. Devised by Jon Rosenblatt, EA Sports’ former International Marketing Director, the Brandtix platform uses over 100 different metrics to analyse athletes’ sports performance, social media activity and their fan sentiment in real-time. This, rationalized with a number of detection algorithms, results in an overall Index Score. As such Brandtix is a robust resource for detecting new talent, identifying players with specific abilities and understanding athletes’ standing with fans. With the most comprehensive, European, football player database, Brandtix data is an invaluable and unique tool for clubs, coaches, sponsors and gaming fans, and has recently enjoyed third-party recognition, having been shortlisted for the 2016 Sports Technology Awards. Brandtix recently launched a free-to-download IoS app featuring its football data, which specifically targets fans of European leagues and players.
About Lexalytics®
Processing billions of unstructured documents every day globally, Lexalytics is the industry leader in translating text into profitable decisions. Lexalytics deploys state-of –the-art cloud and on-prem text and sentiment analysis technologies that transform customers’ thoughts and conversations into actionable insights. The on-premise Salience® and SaaS Semantria® platforms are implemented in a variety of industries for social media monitoring, reputation management and voice of the customer programs. Based in Boston, MA, Lexalytics has offices in the US and Canada. For more information, please visit www.lexalytics.com, email sales@lexalytics.com or call 1-617-249-1049. Follow Lexalytics on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn..
Appendix
The table below gives a breakdown of the countries where Cristiano Ronaldo has the biggest following and the social sentiment of each of one.
Media Contacts:
Released by ENS Ltd on behalf of Brandtix and Lexalytics. For more information or to request specific data, please contact:
Europe
Luke Zak
ENS Ltd
W: 020 3150 2081
U.S.
Rebecca Metz
Metz Communications
512.560.5211